In ACLS Haskins Prize Lecture, Wendy Doniger Talks Life, Heresy in Hinduism, and Attempts to Suppress Scholarship 

July 15, 2015 

NEW YORK – The American Council of Learned Societies today has made available on its website the full video of a lecture made by Wendy Doniger, renowned scholar of Hinduism and mythology, at the Council’s annual meeting this year in May. In the 2015 ACLS Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture, Doniger reminisced with warmth and wit about her colorful childhood and education in Great Neck, New York, and later at Harvard and Oxford Universities and in India. She also described candidly the controversy ignited by her writing in recent years, including the court order obtained by conservative activists in India to remove her book The Hindus: An Alternative History from bookshelves and have all copies pulped. 

Doniger, who mordantly refers to the last decade of storms over her scholarship as “my Indian wars,” has produced over 30 books and numerous scholarly articles on topics as diverse as epic poetry, ancient art, and gender studies. Looking back at her publications to date, Doniger reflected that “the red thread through all of them seems to be the intersecting themes of rebellion and masquerade. More recently, I have been drawn away from masquerade, and into rebellion.” 

Introducing the lecture, ACLS President Pauline Yu observed that “the new knowledge that comes from research can—indeed, will—be unsettling to many. Professor Doniger has needed all her evident wit and determination to persist with her probing scholarship in the face of threats and harassment from both anonymous and organized opponents offended by her explorations of sexuality in myth and religion.” 

“I’ve always felt that what I do is translation both in the literal sense, translating Sanskrit text into English . . . and in the broader sense of translating India for Americans,” Doniger said. Yu also stressed Doniger’s skill as a cultural translator: “She has taken on the great challenge of the humanities: to make complex phenomena of human creativity meaningful across time, space, and language.” 

Haskins Prize Lecturers are asked to reflect on “a life of learning,” and Doniger does just that, tracing the roots of her prodigious scholarly career to a childhood guided by parents who thoroughly instilled a love of books, and to an early fascination with Indian civilization. Discussing her reading, as an adolescent, of Aubrey Menen’s “wickedly satirical retelling” of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, Doniger notes, “I didn’t know then that Menen’s book had already been banned in India under Indian Penal Code 295a. And of course I could not know that I would run headlong into that same law over half a century later.” 

Doniger's lecture can be viewed at www.acls.org/media/haskins/. 

Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. 

About the American Council of Learned Societies
ACLS, a private, nonprofit federation of 73 national scholarly organizations, is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. Advancing scholarship by awarding fellowships and strengthening relations among learned societies is central to our work. Other activities include support for scholarly conferences, reference works, and scholarly communication innovations. 

About the Haskins Prize
Named for the first chairman of ACLS, the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture has as its theme "A Life of Learning." The lecturer is asked “to reflect on a lifetime of work as a scholar and an institution builder, on the motives, the chance determinations, the satisfactions (and dissatisfactions) of the life of learning, to explore through one’s own life the larger, institutional life of scholarship.” The lecture is delivered at the ACLS annual meeting and published in the ACLS Occasional Paper series. The entire series is available online at www.acls.org/pubs/haskins/.

Contact: news@acls.org, 212.697.1505 x144, for media inquiries and for information about how to embed Wendy Doniger’s Haskins Prize Lecture on your website.